Unchaining your LEGO Keychains

As I have mentioned in a previous column, LEGO keychains can be a useful way to acquire certain characters that are otherwise only available as part of large, expensive sets. In addition, a very few characters (like the VIP Club exclusive minifigure) have only been made available as keychains. Keychains typically retail at $4.99 each, which means that they are not much more expensive than a character from the collectible Minifigures line ($2.99 each) or assembled at the Build-A-Mini kiosk found in LEGO Stores ($9.99 for three). Discontinued keychains can sometimes be acquired at a significant discount, usually 50% off. More rarely, individual characters will be marked down to as little as $0.99 if the LEGO Store wants to dispose of their stock of less popular characters quickly. (This is how I acquired several cheap Bossk heads that I recently used for kobolds in The Sunless Citadel.)

The main obstacle to using a keychain as a RPG miniature is, obviously, the chain itself. The chain can be removed by using needle-nose pliers to pry open the loop connecting the chain to the top of the minifigure's head. 

This leaves only the smaller loop set into the head itself. This loop is the head of a screw that is approximately 1 inch long and goes through the hair/headgear (if any), head, neck post, and torso of the minifigure, and ends in the waist piece of the leg assembly. This screw firmly connects all the main body pieces to the chain so that they won't fall off. (The only keychain that I have actually used as a keychain is a Mordor Orc. In the 4-5 years since I bought him, he's lost almost all of his printing, and one leg has come off due to a broken hip post, but everything directly attached to the screw is still as solid as ever.)

I have found instructions online for removing this screw, but every technique involve tools and methods that I am unable and/or unwilling to try, such as excessive brute force or a soldering iron. (Here is one such tutorial, for those who are more willing to risk their minifigures than I am.)

I have, however, been able to use needle-nose pliers to remove the loop from the top of the screw on several figures. This allows the removal of the head and hair/headgear to use with other minifigures. This methods works best on figures who have clear, flat space around the screw, so that the cutting edges of the pliers can get in close to the bottom of the loop to cut it off. Alternately, if you can get a good enough grip on the loop, you can snap it off by bending it sideways. Sometimes, this can result in a break that is both cleaner and further down the screw than cutting could give you (and if you're lucky, less damaging to the plastic).

If you can't quite get to all the way down to the base of the loop to cut it off there, cut off half of the loop, then use the tips of the pliers to bend the remaining bits of loop back and forth until they break off. You may still end up with enough protruding metal at the top that the head doesn't pull off easily. In that case, very carefully apply force to the head to pull it off. Be sure to cover the head with a bit of cloth to protect both the printed face and your fingers. In some cases, I've had to twist the head back and forth until the spur dug the hole just a little larger to allow the head to come off.

Once the head is off, you'll have a quarter-inch or so of screw sticking out of the neck post. Trim that off with the pliers as close as you can (or snap it off by bending it to the side). Unless you have a metal file, you'll probably be left with a small bit of sharp, exposed metal. For this reason, I don't recommend using this method on any keychain that children will be playing with! I always store such minifigure bodies with a head over the neck post, so that the exposed metal will not scratch anything else in the container. Note that the screw makes the neck post thicker than normal, so a head from a keychain may fit a little loosely onto another minifigure's neck due to the time it spent on its original, deformed neck post. And normal minifigure heads may require a little effort to put on or remove from a keychain's neck because they have not been stretched in this way.

A modern standard minifigure head has a partially hollow stud on top, rather than the original flat, solid one. This will help hide the hole left by the screw--and new headgear will cover it entirely. The holes on hair and headgear from keychains will be much more obvious, especially if you had to widen the hole in order to remove the piece. If you wish, fill these holes with putty and paint the patch to match. For my own collection, however, I just leave them as is and ignore the holes.

Unchaining complete!